These companies are deciding what
you, your friends, family and coworkers are allowed to see! To make matters worse,
it's very hard to part the curtains on these big companies, but there seems to be
ample evidence (if you believe all the articles out there) that they are either
lying, cheating, trying to deceive us (or their algorithms have just gone crazy).
The truth is, the media has always filtered what we get to read, hear and watch.
However, the internet has taken the game to a whole new level. Analog media was
more regional and did not have billions of subscribers the way some internet media
companies do. Digital media seems to be saying that they know what we want to see,
share and display better than we do. The sheer number of articles about Facebook
and Google’s alleged media bias speaks volumes. Many of these articles have even
implied that Google and Facebook are trying to influence the upcoming Presidential
election.

In this episode or Working the Web
to Win, we will delve into these alleged deceptive practices that Internet Giants
Google and Facebook have been reportedly engaging in. Are Google and Facebook actually
manipulating the public as if we were puppets on their strings? Do they actually
have that power? I want you to read on and
determine for yourself. Check out the many articles listed on our 6-28-16 notes page.
And yes, you need to read this week’s episode of Working the Web to Win and see
the evidence for yourself so that you can determine if Google and Facebook now control
the Horizontal and Vertical of your Internet Life.

Now in case you think that these
are the raving of a mad republican, conservative, you’d be wrong. I am conservative
on some issues, but I am a lifelong Democrat. However, I have always voted for the
person who I believe is the most honest (if a politician can be called honest) and
the person who offered what I believed to be the best solutions to the main problems
of the day.

Many of you know me as a security
and privacy advocate. I have stated many times that we give these large corporations’
too much access to our personal data and too much control of our interpersonal and
business communications. Now many in the press are not only saying they are
spying on us by collecting massive amounts of data from us, they are also trying
to manipulate our decision making processes with deception, bias and lies. Here's
my real life example!

I saw a video posted by a friend
to my Facebook timeline by SourceFed.com which talked about how
Google skews and filters negative Hillary Clinton searches, which other search engines
were not filtering. In the video, it appears that Google was showing people skewed
search results. I did not believe it at first so I went and tested everything the
video said, and sure enough, it appears that the results were being skewed (whether
on purpose or by accident, I leave up to you). I reposted and shared the video on my timeline
on Facebook and other places.

The next day, I had a lot of trouble
finding my post on Facebook. It was not showing up in my timeline. After about an
hour of searching, I found it by doing a graph search. When I did find it, the video
image was no longer showing in the post. Facebook had altered my timeline and the
post.

Other large social networks are
not doing this. I looked at my Post on LinkedIn and Twitter and they showed up as
posted. I also looked at Google+, but I have no easy way of knowing if people could
see my post for any length of time. But at least from what I could see, it was unaltered.

So if you think I’m the only one
who is a little paranoid about this issue, you would be absolutely wrong. At the
beginning of this article I mention several articles about censorship and bias in
the media. Now I want to provide several examples of these articles so you can make
up your own mind and begin to see the sheer magnitude of this issue.

After experiencing my Facebook episode
first hand, I decided to do a little research to see if others had seen this kind
of search censorship and timeline manipulation. Lo and behold, there were hundreds
of articles relating to this subject. Again, our blogs note page dated 6-28-16 has
many more links to articles and you can do a search for yourself to see the large
number of articles out there. I recommend doing your search using Yahoo, Bing or
even DuckDuckGo just so you have peace of mind. The following is just a small sample
of what I saw.

In an article called “Google Search Algorithm Could Steal the Presidency”,
the author, Adam Rodgers states, “IMAGINE AN ELECTION—Aclose one. You’re undecided. So you type the name of one of the
candidates into your search engine of choice. (Actually, let’s not be coy here.
In most of the world, one search engine dominates; in Europe and North America,
it’s Google.) And Google coughs up, in fractions of a second, articles and facts
about that candidate. Great! Now you are an informed voter, right? But astudypublished this week says that the order of
those results, the ranking of positive or negative stories on the screen, can have
an enormous influence on the way you vote. And if the election is close enough,
the effect could be profound enough to change the outcome.”That’s
right, they are saying that Googles’ search algorithm could directly affect the
voters’ decision making and influence their final vote!

Now this does not prove that Google
is directly acting in a biased way. It is possible that their algorithm favors certain
types of posts or it’s possible the liberals have figured out how to game the system
in some way. Google denies any wrong doing. You need to make up your own mind.

In another article on PJ Media, by Rick Moran,
Moran states that“Google's algorithm is proprietary,
so forget about anyone seeing it to determine the cause of this effect. But it would
be interesting to see if one party or the other was usually or always negatively
impacted by the ranking of search results.
The rankings of positive and negative stories are a by-product of the algorithm
-- not the intent of Google managers. But could Google -- or a campaign -- actually
game the system to manipulate a desired result?” What
a great question!

Even the Huffington post, (not a
bastion of conservatism) ran an article where Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder,
(another person not in the conservative camp) states at a conference in Mexico City,
that“Google
was now Hillary’s secret weapon,”and it was
reported that he provided lots of material showing that this Google conspiracy was
the real deal. I don’t want to single out Google here. Since I have provided several examples about
Google, let’s look at some of the recent articles published purporting Facebooks
censorship and media bias as well.

On May 9th, 2016, in Fox Nation,
a report by Michael Nunez Gizmodo had the headline “Report: Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely
Suppressed Conservative News”. Gizmodo’s article states that“Facebook
workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from
the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former
journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented
stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative
topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically
trending among the site’s users. Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they
were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially
“inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular
enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all.” Now
if that doesn’t scare you read on.

The next article I read made the
hair on the back of my neck stand up. I found
this article in Fortune and it should
make you take notice. The article starts out by stating the obvious, that suppressing
conservative speech is controversial and that Facebook denied it was filtering conservative
news. The article further goes on to state that,“As a number of observers have pointed out (includingFortune), the question isn’t so much whether Facebook filters out certain kinds
of news—something that newspapers and other media entities do every day without
much scrutiny. The real point is that Facebook isorders of magnitude largerand more influential than any traditional media outlet, and
yet the way it chooses the news its billion users see is still fundamentally opaque.”
That’s right Facebook doesn’t have to be transparent on how they
get new or how they share news, even though the provide it to billions of people
every day.

Since Facebook’s initial denial of any bias or filtering, the world’s
most popular social network has instituted special anti-bias training
for its editorial staff to make sure bias is not taking place. After reading this, the first question
that came to my mind was; If Facebook wasn’t engaged in editorial bias, then why
would they need anti-bias training?

More recently, Facebook has allegedly shown that it's still trying
to influence politics because they have been accused of editorial bias with regards to Brexit election
in England. This time they are accused of being on the conservative side.
The article states, “The Brexit-related accusations came about after
it was noticed that Facebook offered a ready-made status update proclaiming to be
“in favour of leaving the EU”, but didn’t have a balancing pro-remain option as
easily accessible. Despite this, Facebook categorically denies any form of bias.”

Now it should be no secret that
the media has been filtering the news since news was invented. First of all, no
news or media service can provide “all the facts all of the time”. In my opinion,
the real problem is the sheer volume of influence internet media giants have over
the public at large. Before the internet, TV had the greatest sway, but even the
large networks were still divided into multiple markets and none of them had a 70%
global market share.

Today internet media giants like
Facebook, with 1.5 billion subscriber’s and Google, which controls more than 70%
of all internet searches, have a de facto stranglehold on what is presented to more
than 25% of the world’s population. These private corporations don’t have any semblance
of transparency as to how they decide what we are shown. On top of that, it's nearly
impossible to part the curtains to see what they are doing. So far the vast amount
of articles that allege impropriety is growing. Will we be able to discover if they
are directly trying to influence the election before it takes place? That’s yet
to be seen. What they stand to gain or lose should be on everyone's mind.

For years’ conservative groups have
claimed media bias and current events are providing an ever growing mountain of
evidence that this may be the case. When I did a search on media bias and internet
censorship (just on the Google and Facebook stories) I found more than 50 articles
in a matter of minutes. Since then I have found hundreds more.

Although media bias is not something
new, the fact that a few companies control the access

to so large a market is. As
a people, we need to demand that these companies act transparently and provide us
with unbiased news as often as possible (especially since they say they are). If we allow any news organ to engage in deceptive
practices, we are giving up our ability to make informed political decisions. In
essence, we will be losing our freedom to choose. If the allegations purported in
the many articles discussed in this story are true, then Google and Facebook are
at the very lease trying to influence our votes, if not steal the election. I personally
don’t have a problem with Facebook or Google trying to overtly influence voters
as long as they openly admit this fact. My issue is that they shouldn’t be permitted
to cloak their activities under the guise of reporting the news.

Make sure you do your due diligence
on everything you read on the internet. Anyone can publish anything and call it
the truth. To make matters even worse, large corporation’s and even our own government
has been shown to use the news to push their agenda and to convince the public to
make decisions that are not always in their best interest. As Americans, it is our
duty to make informed decisions and vote our conscience. To do that we need unbiased
news sources. To ensure that, make sure you do your internet searches on multiple
search engines. This election, we need to be informed
voters by reading PolitiFact.com, and we need to dig deeper into Fact Check.org
to make sure you know the facts. If we do this, we will make informed
decisions that are based on multiple points of view. This will assure that we pass
down America’s liberty and freedom to our children and future generations to come.

That’s my opinion, I look forward
to reading yours.

Get your free copy.

In
this article I have discussed the alleged censorship and bias being purported
by many news agencies by Google and Facebook. I have provided many examples of these
alleged improprieties and have made recommendations of what we can do to insure
our freedom to make informed decisions, and retain the freedoms Americans enjoy. I
have also included links to dozens of other articles that provide further
details so that you can make your own informed decision.

Hector
Cisneros is COO and director of Social Media Marketing at Working
the Web to Win, an
award-winning Internet marketing company based in Jacksonville, Florida. He is also co-host of the weekly
Internet radio show, "Working
the Web to Win" on
BlogTalkRadio.com, which airs every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern. Hector is a
syndicated writer and published author of “60 Seconds
to Success.”

There seem to be apps
for nearly everything these days. In 2015, there were over 1.6 million apps
available for Android and over 1.5 million available for iPhone. Over 1000 apps
are submitted every day to the Apple’s App Store. In all likelihood, apps are
being created for Android at the same rate or faster. Welcome to The Planet of
the Apps.

Apps are ostensibly
created to help users of the app in some way. However, there’s another part of
the app story that many users are blissfully unaware of. When you sign up for
an app you have to agree to the provider’s terms of service, which are in fine
print that nobody ever reads. Generally, the terms include an agreement that
the provider can collect, use, and sell data based on your use of the app. The
data gets crunched so that the provider, or whoever buys the data, can
determine what products and services it can send very targeted ads to you
about.

Social networks are very
good at collecting data and they are getting better at using it all the time. Capitalizing
on personal data is lucrative for companies which have that capability. When
you sign up for a social network, you are asked questions concerning everything
from your age and sex, to your likes, dislikes, movies and books you have seen
and read, photos, videos and more. Then you are encouraged to share even
more personal information on a daily basis. Finally, you are prompted to tell
friends and family about the network. This is the essence of social
networking.

So, what kinds of
apps are being created?

Good Apps

Many apps are doing
good in the world. For example, there are several related to healthcare and
prescriptions that seem to make sense.

Courtesy CareZone

CareZoneclaims to be “The easiest way for you
and your family to manage medications and doctor's
instructions.” Keeping track of medications can be challenging, especially for
people who take lots of meds. CareZone has lots of positive reviews.

Medisafe
claims it can help to “Keep yourself and loved ones safe and never forget to
take your meds again with Medisafe, the app
tested by pharmacists.” The Medisafe mission is to give people the
tools, support and information they need to take their medications the way
they're supposed to. Like CareZone, Medisafe has lots of positive reviews.

Blink Health tells
users they can “Use Blink Health to save up to 85% on your prescriptions at
virtually every U.S. pharmacy.” This app has no membership fees and no monthly premiums. You simply pay for the needed medications.

Bad Apps

Some apps don’t seem to make much sense. Here are a few examples.

Courtesy SMTH

Send Me to Heaven records how
high you can throw your phone. There’s a global leaderboard for the highest throws.
Send me to Heaven is no longer available on iPhone. Apparently Apple decided it
wasn’t a good idea to encourage behavior that could damage devices. However, it’s
still available on Android.

Tweetpee was a wearable app
developed by Huggies. It had a sensor which sent a tweet to the parent when the
child urinated and needed the diaper changed. The parent could also retweet the
wonderful news - #Juniortinkled! - but who in the world would do that? It seems
like a bit much and it might not have caught on. It was in the testing phase in
2013 and does not appear to be available currently.

I am Rich was created with the
sole purpose of showing people that you could afford it. Developer Armin
Heinrich made the app in 2008. It did absolutely nothing and was priced at
$999.99, the highest price allowed in the app store. I Am Rich was listed in
Apple’s App Store on August 5, 2008. In just a few hours, 8 people purchased
the app. Apple removed I Am Rich from the store shortly thereafter. They also
gave refunds to two users who claimed they had purchased it by mistake. The app
is now available on Android and it is free! That takes pointless to a whole
other level.

The Most Useless App Ever claims to show how useless
an app can be. It also invites users to try out the most useless widget ever, for
a complete experience of uselessness. There’s even a useless counter to count up
how useless the application is and for how many people.

The Most Expensive Android
Application/Widget is for people who have lots of money and
don’t know how to spend it all. Like I am Rich and the Most Useless App Aver,
this one does very little other than present itself to the user or to anyone
the user wants to impress.

Funny Apps

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Cheezburgeris one of the most
popular humor sites on the internet. It claims to have more than 10 million
visitors per month. The Cheezburger app is popular as well. The app lets you
browse videos, images, jokes, comics, and other hilarious content. Lately, some
of the reviews have been less than glowing. Some users write that it, “Used to be
a good app.”

Food Battle is a parody of every
tap-and-play, cute game on Android. Your mission is to kill deadly donuts that
have taken your friends and family hostage. It has been downloaded over a
million times. Some users say that it is a pleasant change from Angry Birds or
Candy Crush.

Surgeon Simulator allows users to play
a doctor who has no intention to save patients. You can play as an ER surgeon
or a dentist. If destroying the lives of people who put their lives under your
care is appealing to you, this could be the game for you. Currently, there is
an invitation on the home page to “Perform a heart transplant on Trump and cast
your vote.”

Lord of the Apps

With all the apps now
available, it’s probably not easy to keep them all organized and up to date.
That gives me an idea for a new app that I might create. Lord of the Apps – One app to rule them all, and in the darkness
bind them.

Apps can be useful
and fun. However, before users sign up for any app, they should consider the
price of admission. Usually, that involves the collection of data about you and
your habits, and then the use of or sale of that data for marketing and
advertising. You should never forget that the ultimate purpose of most apps is
not to help the user. The ultimate purpose of most apps is to generate revenue
for the developers and distributors of the app. Keeping that in mind will help
you to decide whether or not you want an app.

---

In this article I
have discussed Apps: The Good, The Bad, and The Funny. I’ve also discussed
the ultimate purpose of apps which is usually to generate revenue for the
developers and the distributors. Users should be aware of that before signing
up for a new app.

You can also use the
search box at the top of this blog to find even more articles by typing in
video in the search field.

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By Hector Cisneros I have been actively networking in a number of organizations since the early 1980’s. My experience, tells me that most...

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